When intellectual work of any kind, artistic or scientific and scholarly, is undertaken cooperatively by a number of persons associated in the enterprise, it will also involve conversation or discussion.
In the first place, it often appears as if our teachers and scholars were deliberately in league to mystify and befog the popular mind regarding this practical value of intellectual work.
When we think about the concept of “learning”, we often picture someone lost in some kind of intellectual work – doing research, reading a book, or maybe working through a bunch of math problems.
And it's sort of like I had to do all of this, like, really difficult intellectual work to arrive at a conclusion that I probably could have just told you in a cynical way at the beginning.